Kojoga Adawudu, lawyer for the National Democratic Congress (NDC) Deputy General Secretary who was arrested on Tuesday for treason, says the police are being influenced by some persons in government.
According to him the refusal of the police to grant Koku Anyidoho bail flouts the service procedure of the law enforcement agency.
Mr Anyidoho is being held for suggesting that the President, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, will be overthrown in a civil revolt which will begin on Wednesday.
An NDC-backed demonstration is set to take place Wednesday to protest the 2018 Ghana-US defence cooperation deal. Many believe the agreement endangers Ghana’s national security.
The specific comments made Tuesday that landed Mr Anyidoho in police custody are: “On January 13, 1972, a certain Col. Ignatius Kutu Acheampong led a movement that removed the Progress Party from power. Busia was the Prime Minister and Akufo-Addo’s father was a ceremonial president. Somebody should tell Nana Akufo-Addo that history has a very interesting way of repeating itself. There’ll be a civil revolt.”
The comments have been widely condemned as unfortunate and unwarranted.
After first charging the outspoken NDC Deputy General Secretary with causing fear and panic, police changed the charge against him to high treason before finally settling on treason, his lawyer revealed.
Speaking on the arrest on PM Express, a current affairs programme that airs on the Joy News channel on MultiTV, Mr Adawudu said although the police acted professionally in the processes leading to the arrest, their refusal to grant Mr Anyidoho bail is telling.
“If you look at the procedure and by law, the police are given some mandate to grant bail…and in this matter, we are being investigated. Not that we have been charged for the offence,” Mr Adawudu told PM Express host, Ayisha Ibrahim.
Mr Adawudu reveals that after arguing with the police that his client must be granted bail, a few of the uniformed men told him that by “instruction from above: there will be no bail. Or they [police] don’t have instruction from the authority to grant bail.”
‘I smell an elephant’
Information Minister, Mustapha Hamid, justified the arrest, describing it as a “routine.”
He said security agencies have the right to invite for questioning anyone deemed to have made “treasonable” comments in order to establish if the person was merely “bluffing or otherwise.”
But Mr Adawudu is convinced that these comments, made before the charge of treason was pronounced on Koku Anyidoho, gives an idea about the faces behind the “orders from above”.
“What makes me smell some elephant [the symbol of the governing New Patriotic Party (NPP)] is that when we were asking the police to give us the exact charge…they couldn’t even tell us,” Mr Adawudu said
Meanwhile, Mr Adawudu said Mr Anyidoho has been taken to a holding cell at the Bureau of National Investigations (BNI).
Joynews
